Crickets
by Mithrigil
Summary: [Suikoden III] A series of vignettes relating to the life of Albert Silverberg and those with whom he traded influence.


**Crickets**

_**a collection of vignettes pertaining to the life of Albert Silverberg**_

_by Mithrigil Galtirglin_

Written originally for the Thirty Evil Deeds Livejournal Community

_A.N.: The pieces have been reassembled in chronological order. This is neither the order in which they were written or assigned. The words in parentheses underneath each title are the phrase-of-inspiration as prescribed by the moderators of the community._

**

* * *

****

* * *

****-Founder-**

_(foundation)_

Julian Silverberg is a hero only insofar as he delayed the inevitable. A thoroughly staggering number of people were supposed to die in the Golden Revolution, and did not because of Julian Silverberg's forethought and contrivance. The strategist was awarded a surname, a crest, and a creed for his service to the people, and wounds and losses reportedly received during an assassination attempt that preceded the truce.

The truth is that he stabbed out his left eye with a letter opener and recited a few arcane words. He gathered the eye and the blood-tears kaming and swelling from the empty socket in an ashtray, which was the only container handy, and drank it in shifts. When his butler came in to the room to ask if all was well, Julian explained the situation and handed a vial of poison to the servant, then excused him and, this time, locked the door.

Then came the waiting. He sat for hours, staring at his despondent eye, grey and viscous, flecked with the gold of his blood and the deep brown of loose, spelt tobacco.

The Demon of Chaos answered the summons as soon as the butler's bowels gave way and heart stopped, between the second and third watches of the night. Julian made his case to the Demon; the Demon would would rescind his claim to however many souls were condemned to die in the final battle, and instead of the singular battle to cripple the continent, the lives would be paid to him in time, in generations of war.

With interest, the Demon demanded.

With interest, Julian allowed.

It was established that Julian's seed would continue, in direct line, at least until the debt was paid, and that any of his scions born under a Star would be free from the Demon's wrath. The terms of sacrifice and summoning were drawn out; one life for one war, it was written on the Demon's forehead in Julian's blood, and sealed with the vitreous fluid from his eye. Once writ, the words seeped through the demon's smoldering skin in a pale haze, and with a grin and a flicker of long, fair hair, the demon was gone.

Julian convinced the army of the man he served to remain encamped instead of abandoning the fortress to the ensuing hurricane. Three weeks of inclement weather allowed for the final offensive to be canceled and negotiations to begin, and even when the sun broke the stalemate was accepted.

He chose the name "Silverberg", for the sheen of the fortress' walls when the storm broke. For a creed, "I will either find a way or make one". And for a crest, a free grey eye in a clear white frame, cut like crystal, with the words pooled under the eye in an elegant crimson cursive.

**

* * *

****-Allegory-**

_(shards of glass, glittering like diamonds)_

"_And the king put the baby down on the castle floor,_" his mother read and turned the page, her velvet sleeves warm against the toddler's cheek. "_And he stepped back, and watched as the baby noticed the two piles of things that sparkled._ See, Albert?" she chirped, pointing at the picture in the book across Albert's lap. "There--that's the pile of diamonds, and that's the pile of hot glass. See how alike they are?"

Albert frowned. His pudgy cheeks lowered and he leaned closer to the pages, but had to bat the red curls of hair out of his eyes. "Die-mun," he said, patting the picture with the palm of his hand.

The mother beamed. "Yes, Albert. Diamonds. And _this_ one is glass," she said, pointing to the other picture with a long, blue fingernail. She tapped it, and Albert saw that she was trying to get him to notice something, but smiled and kept knocking his palms against the other picture.

"Die-mun," he gurgled again.

His mother's laugh was a sweet, high sound, like the birds outside his window in the mornings. "So _you_ can tell the difference, but do you think the other baby could?"

Albert stopped patting the painted pile of diamonds and considered the other baby's picture. The drawing showed a thin child, smaller than Albert thought he was, with lanky dark hair and dark skin. But there was something wide about the boy-in-the-picture's eyes that made Albert consider that maybe the other boy saw what Albert saw.

Before he could answer, his mother turned the page. The pile of diamonds was on the next page too, though, so Albert was happy. "He could tell, but heaven told him to crawl toward the shards of glass instead." She ruffled her son's hair and pointed at the picture of the dark boy crawling toward the wrong pile, and she read, "_And the boy was guided by Fate to the pile of smoldering glass, and like any other boy his age would have done, picked up the glittering thing and put it in his mouth. It burned his tongue, but saved his life._"

Albert sniffed, and rubbed his red curls out of his eyes. "Stupid fate," he said.

**

* * *

**

**-Watch-**

_(sleep)_

Yuber never slept.

It was something Albert had remembered from, and been fascinated by, when he was a child. Grandfather had informed him very concretely of this, that there would quite literally be a monster roaming the house at all hours of the night, not under the boy's bed or in the boy's closet but anywhere else the demon pleased. Grandfather never _cautioned_ Albert--it would have been tantamount to skewering the child on the demon's swords _for_ him--but he did make it abundantly clear to the boy that the house was not as safe as it had once been.

"And yet," Grandfather had said, "if you showed signs of being..."

"Of?"

"...of being like me," he'd further clarified.

The boy had nodded. "More still," he stated rather than asked, with an eye on his favorite of the paintings in this house, in the darkest corner of Grandfather's study. He assumed that the adults were his great-grandparents and great-uncle, but was quite certain that the boy was Grandfather, perhaps five years older than Albert had been at the time of the lecture. Boy-Grandfather was thicker-faced than Albert, and his hair was a deeper, browner red the color of earth on the riverbank, but Albert mimicked that expression in the looking-glass whenever he remembered to, and found the faces quite indistinguishable at times. "And if so, what?"

There! There the face had been, only withered in the cheeks and wider at the eyebrows, thick and imposing like the tutor's rod. It was an indignant face, closeted, even angry. Albert loved that face. "If you show signs of being like me," Grandfather had finally said, "then you will be as safe with him as you will ever get."

As a child Albert had lost nights, perhaps weeks, of sleep after that. He would sit up with his ears to the door of his bedroom, reading by the meager light that crept in where the door didn't quite meet the carpet, listening for the demon's footsteps. It was comforting, somehow, the idea that someone so dangerous prowled his life, more or less on his side of the line. And so when he was allowed to be awake, the boy watched the demon, and when he was meant to be asleep, he fancied that the demon was watching him.

It was no different now Albert was grown.

**

* * *

-Haunt- **

_(candlestick)_

Grandfather sometimes shuddered when he slept, more now since the demon was gone and the war was over. Pretty soon after that last courier had come (with news that Albert's father was dead, the child knew), they'd left for the front, and Grandfather had come back alone. He took coffee in the mornings, slept later. Perhaps he was old, now, or very nearly. Albert surmised that there was, of course, more to it, and came to his share of conclusions.

With no one in the halls to stop him--of what significance were mere servants, when there had once been a monster on the prowl?--the boy of eight roamed freely, his stockinged feet ghostly and glowing white against the lavish carpet. A battered cavalry of warm light, candles upon candles, crept out of the library doors and into the hall, washing the child's ashen face and linen nightgown to a specter's pallor. He brushed his hair and the sleep from his eyes with shadow-framed fingers, clutching his baby brother's blanket in his other fist.

The great table of the library was an island in the darkness, with mountains of books and trees of fire. Grandfather was collapsed across them, almost as if dead, his curled palm open beside a quarter-full glass of water, his thick red eyebrows knotted and haunted, twitching. The old man breathed, and the candles nearest him rustled like curtains thin enough to be mistaken for ghosts.

Albert smiled and stepped nearer, dragging the blanket behind him. "What do you dream about, Grandfather?" the child almost mused rather than ask. When the old man answered with only a rattling breath, Albert dipped his forefinger and thumb in the glass and snuffed out the candles on their resplendent sticks, dozens of them, one at a time.

The gesture would haunt Leon until the day he died.

**

* * *

-Blindside- **

_(library)_

The desk almost broke Albert's tooth.

"Put that in your purse and spend it, you little shit!" A pattern-soled boot slammed into Albert's back and he thought, passively, about where the foot might have been.

Albert felt around his mouth with a panicked tongue and was thankful not to taste blood. "I'll call you a carriage home," he wheezed, and laughed just a little under what remained of his breath.

"Smartass!" Broschi shouted, giving the smaller teenager another kick in the small of his back for good measure. Broschi wasn't much taller than Albert, but enough that when he lifted the redhead up by his shirt-collar Albert's feet weren't entirely on the ground. He lolled his head to look down his nose at Broschi, whose growl smelled like day-old hot chocolate. "How _dare_ you turn me in."

Albert flailed his arms about for an instant, knocking the inkwell and salts off the desk before realizing that there was a letter-opener to grab for instead. He missed it on the first and second tries.

"How _DARE_ you turn me in."

"You were dissem--"

"Take the classroom talk and _shove it down your pansy throat,_ Silverberg," Broshci yelled right into Albert's face, tightening his grip on the boy's collar. "We're here to learn to blindside, not obey."

He managed to get a grip on the letter opener, in his off-hand, without Broschi noticing.

The larger teen gave Albert a good hard _shake,_ then threw him into the nearest bookshelf. Mid-flight, Albert managed to get the letter-opener through the lining of his side-pocket and cut a shallow swathe into his back, close enough to where Broschi had kicked to let loose blood from the swarming bruise.

It didn't take many words to incite Broschi to attack again. "You couldn't blindside a _corpse,_" Albert coughed, forcing weakness onto his voice. He was going to make this work.

It did. "I'll make you a corpse and prove it!" he yelled, barreling at Albert. The Silverberg ducked, not enough to get out of the way, but enough to wedge the letter-opener behind a pile of green-covered books where it could just have easily have fallen on its own. He smiled, then grimaced when Broschi punched him a few more times, but he knew that the school doctors wouldn't be able to ignore the cuts the way they had the bruises.

After Broschi was expelled, no one dared tussle with Albert for the remainder of his time at Soldat.

**

* * *

-Sled- **

_(kittens)_

If there was one thing Caesar, Albert, _and_ Leon agreed on, it was a hatred of cats. Leon was generally loathed by animals; Albert, in an effort to emulate him, shunned them. Caesar's distrust of cats, though, was unique to cats, and quite possibly Albert's fault.

Albert had come back from Soldat on holiday, in the winter. He would soon be twelve, and Caesar would sooner be five. And winter was often cruel at Altestein, exacerbated by the Grandfather's tendency to reprimand the boys by sending them outside, whether they were fully prepared for the weather or not.

Both boys were in the wrong this time; Caesar's sled had broken one of its sharp, metal runners and he had not told Leon, and Albert had stubbornly refused to share _his_ sled on the grounds that Caesar would just break it as well. It had come to shouting, and then to shouting about things other than sleds, and then Leon found the shouting so unbearable that he shouted back at them and sent both boys back into the snow just as it was getting too dark for sledding and the trees surrounding the house and hills looked like an army of witches.

For reasons Caesar did not fully understand, Albert seemed less skittish and afraid outside at night in the winters than in the summers. (It would take years for the truth to dawn on Caesar, who would be middle-aged and in bed with his concubine an ocean away.) And so young Caesar did the presumably smart thing and kept close to the woodsy sections of the vast, white yard, where Albert never went if he could help it. The older boy stayed near the house, shielding the tome he read from the falling snow with a spare scarf, and sat on the contested sled as if it was made of rubies and platinum, not cherrywood and steel. Caesar's broken sled, the jagged runner jutting out like an arrow's feathers, was leant against the porch ridge beside Albert.

Scowling, without gloves, and not as ready for the snow as he could have been, Caesar puttered through the frozen lawn right up to where the bare-branched trees and bushes gathered thick enough that snow hadn't fallen under them. He tugged his scarves tighter over his tiny ears and wrapped his pink fingers in the wool, and looked back at the sprawling brown house, proudly warm against the whiteness of the hills. His scarf caught on a low branch of one of the overgrown, dead-fingered bushes, and he turned back to tug it free.

That was when he saw the kitten. It was huddled in the brambles, sad-looking, wide-eyed and messy-haired (like Caesar), and the fur was the same color as the boy's hair in places, but the rest was black. Caesar realized that those patches of fur were red because the kitten was bleeding, or had been very recently. He reached down to pet it, frowning and mouthing "kitty" as he knelt.

Then the thing didn't look like a kitten anymore. It spun around and the branches cracked and screeched and something burned on Caesar's hand which made him scream too, and the scary black whirlwind yowled and flailed and Caesar yelled "Al!" and ran back to the house, but his scarf was stuck in the bush and suddenly his back hurt too, but a colder and harder kind of hurt than his hand. He realized he'd fallen down and smelled blood and screamed and thought the not-kitty was going to eat him.

The broken sled soared over Caesar's head and into the bush. It crunched like overcooked toast.

Caesar kept screaming--the broken sled had gotten so close to his nose that he could feel it and was even scarier than the not-kitty--but nothing happened. He opened his eyes, because he'd closed them without knowing it, and saw the back of the sled, dripping snow onto his forehead from between the cherrywood boards. He panted instead of screaming for a minute, and wriggled out from under the sled, leaving his scarf tangled in the bush. Everything smelled like metal and the stuff that Grandfather put in his coffee sometimes at night. Snow plopped onto his nose, but it was brownish-pink.

"Let me see it," Albert said. He was closer--Caesar turned around and his brother was right there, holding out his gloved hand. Caesar, whimpering, put his bleeding hand into Albert's palm, but looked down at the bush.

The kitty was so tiny, Caesar thought. Tinier now that its head was hanging off.

"What was it?" the older boy asked, prying Caesar's scarf loose from the bush and wrapping up the bitten hand in it.

"Kitty," Caesar sniffed.

Albert shook his head. "Surely a bobcat at least," he said, peering over Caesar's shoulder at the bloody sled and the matted remains of the creature, It...it _was_ too small for a bobcat, but surely he'd refrain from telling Caesar the truth about that. "Let's get you inside," he added, leading Caesar through the snow by his bleeding hand, wrapped in the gnarled and twig-covered scarf.

But it _had_ been a kitty, Caesar knew. It _had_ been.

**

* * *

-Pact- **

_(the villain of the story)_

_My rightness cannot be denied,_ Julian wrote and so Albert read. _If history is to be writ by the victorious, I will be forever perceived as their savior. For my actions--that I will inform the people of, at least--I will be lauded, credited with preserving the land and livelihood of a number beyond even my ken. I am their hero, risking all but my own life to preserve theirs, and succeeding where most heroes fail._

_You, my children, know that I am not a hero. The world shall not, cannot, know me for the villain of the story. I recall my own words, my jaded remarks about justifying my own depravity and dealing with the surplus population. How young I was, and yet, how correct. What have_ (the journal emphasized)_ I done but provide a surmountable and satiable antagonist to the heroes of the future? This does, in fact, slate my line to play the villains. I imagine that many of my successors will not take kindly to that prospect. I imagine--with a certain fear--that my line will branch. Such things cannot be prevented, I am aware._

_The bearer of this journal may perhaps content himself with the notion that through his villainous acts, in complying with my pact, he is partaking in a sort of backhanded heroism. The notion is fanciful, granted, but not altogether untrue._

Perhaps if it had not been sacrilege, Albert would have laughed. As it stood he was tapping his gloved fingers uneasily on the vellum, darting his eyes from the words on the page to the students reading beside him in the One Temple. He felt something akin to the illicit glee of stealing his younger brother's blanket from his cradle when they had been children. He gently closed the volume and stroked the ridges of binding along its spine as he might someday a lover's.

**

* * *

-Earring- **

_(amber and jade)_

He sired his first bastard at the age of twenty-one.

The woman was a maid in Crystal Palace, which inferred that she was technically a first-class citizen, perhaps the third or fourth daughter of a house in its decline. She was bright but not thoroughly educated, shrewd but not cunning, amber-haired and jade-eyed but not especially distinctive. She was, however, of interest to the young strategist, looking to purge his excess of jubilation at having finally attained the field credentials to begin his life's work.

He wooed her quietly, with the occasional darting glance and emphasized word in conversations he had when she could hear him. Here she was, serving tea as he hobnobbed with the Harmonian Ranks, the talk of war going over her head but the words sounding altogether too personal. Here she was, gossiping with her Lady (who had set her cap for the newcomer, of course, and gave the maid more concrete information about the man than she would ever learn from him of her own accord), when the strategist walked by, shirking his outer coat but leaving on his scarf, as if his skin was some sort of nefarious plot that if exposed would discredit him. The idea of draped fabric seemed to suit him, and he held the long white coat over his arm the way other men held shields. And she found it fascinating, and indulged her Lady's whimsy just to hear more about this young man, entertaining the possibility of becoming his mistress, perhaps if her Lady married him and grew disgusted over time.

She did not expect that he would be standing in the window of her Lady's chambers on the night her Lady took ill at court, and was thus being seen to by doctors in their wards, ten stories down and a world of concern away. The lights of the city seeped in through the window and flickered against his pale, northern face and dark red hair, and he corrected her when she forgot to lock the door behind her. She did not expect to wake up naked in her Lady's bed, alone before even the sunlight had pervaded the valley, but she welcomed the chance to quickly dress and proceed with her day as if the night had never happened. She did not expect the denizens of Crystal Palace to be immune to gossip, and she did not expect she would be serving this Lady for very much longer (whether it be because the poison killed her, or because of the maid's transgression), but she did not rightly care. And she did not expect to see a silver ring through the man's ear when she passed him in the corridor, for it had been as naked as the rest of him the night before.

Her dresses only began to tighten after he left to conduct some war, somewhere. The Bishop Sasarai himself accepted the child when the mother died of having it, and named him Mathiu, just to spite the father.

**

* * *

-When the Stars Come Out- **

_(a bag of gold)_

Lyle had the sharpest eyes on the block. Any of the other boys would say so, 'cept maybe Kix, but Kix was a dirty liar. Lyle could spot a coin on the ground from across the street and tell whether a necklace was made of real silver. But not gold, 'cause gold was tricky.

And Lyle was a good people-spotter too. He knew who would give money if he asked, and who would give money if he _did_ something, and who wouldn't give money at all. The give-money people were never the really, really rich-looking ones. The give-money-if-you-do-something-for-me people were sometimes the ones in gold carriages, but usually not rich-looking at all. Lyle stayed away from them when he could, but sometimes he just got too hungry. They usually wanted him to run a letter between places, or tell them about the women who did what his mother did. Some of them wanted him to _do_ what his mother did, but Lyle ran away very quickly if they asked that. He'd never been _that_ hungry.

Lyle spotted the man in the white coat. He looked rich, but was young, and seemed like one of the fire-starters that fought against the soldiers from Crystal Valley and wanted the poor people to have money too. And Lyle was hungry enough now that he wouldn't have minded running a letter or giving directions, so he went up to the man in the white coat, opened his eyes real cute, and asked, "Is'r anything I can do for you, milord?" 'cause people that looked like the man in the white coat usually reacted to being called 'milord'.

The man in the white coat--whose hair was red like dried blood or smeared grapes--thought for a bit, then shook his head. "But here," he said, and held out a hand, and in the palm of his glove were three heavy coins.

People usually smiled when they just gave Lyle money, of they had teary eyes. The man in the white coat, though, didn't have an expression. So Lyle hesitated a little, but snatched up the coins right quick. He stammered out a "thank you," and backed away, but he must have looked confused, because the man in the white coat raised an eyebrow and narrowed his lips, which wasn't usually a good sign to Lyle.

"Was it not enough?" the stranger asked, pulling a whole bag of gold the size of his white fist out of his white coat.

This shocked Lyle enough that he almost dropped the coins he already had.

"There is more," the man in the white coat said. "It's not mine. I found it in that building," he added, tossing his head at one of the old lots-of-people houses down the street where men sometimes took Lyle's mother.

Lyle barely managed a "Really?"

The man in white nodded. "In the walls. I am planning on getting the rest tonight."

Lyle was suddenly a very different kind of hungry. "How?"

"Dig it out," the man said, as if it was nothing. "Will you help me?"

Lyle nodded eagerly.

The man in white nodded back, once, slowly. "Then bring a lit candle," he said, "and anyone else who can help."

"Arright," Lyle chirped, and nodded, but was thinking to himself that he'd only split it with the man in white and keep all the gold for himself and his mother, and maybe 'Ka."

"A lit candle," the man said, "when the stars come out. That way I'll know it's you."

Lyle scurried away with a happy nod, wishing he could tell the other boys how much gold he was going to get. But he'd have to wait until after he'd actually got it. A lit candle, he sang in his head, when the stars come out, and then a great big bag of gold!

He stopped skipping when he got far enough away and remembered to bite down on one of the coins. It seemed real, he thought, but then, gold was tricky.

But the man in the white coat had said to bring anyone else who could help, which meant it might be a big job, but Lyle knew that the more people he told the less gold he'd get. So Lyle decided to tell one person, a girl, 'Ka, which was short for something. 'Ka would do anything for Lyle, even keep a secret, she'd said so herself. So Lyle told her, and she got really excited, so much that her little Fire Rune got sparkly, and they went to the lots-of-people house together as soon as it got dark enough.

Clutching their candles, not yet lit, the children waited on the street at first, and didn't see the man in the white coat anywhere. 'Ka said he might already be inside, so they snuck around the back to where the entrance that Lyle's mother sometimes used was.

"Smells funny," 'Ka said.

"Smells better than normal," Lyle replied.

They shut the door, because they thought it was supposed to be a secret. The room was dark, and Lyle and 'Ka could hear the banging and creaking through the ceiling pipes and grates. Lyle wondered if his mother was here tonight. It sounded like lots of other people were. But the man in white was nowhere.

And then he remembered--he was supposed to light the candle!

Lyle didn't have flint or a match or even the right kind of stone, but 'Ka had her little Fire Rune so he gave her both candles. She put the wick between her pudgy little fingers. A tiny spark flickered from her precious little Rune onto the candle's wick. She smiled, and her smile was silvery.

And that was the last thing Lyle saw before _everything_ was fire.

**

* * *

-Uneventful- **

_(counting the hours)_

The hot water stung almost more that the knife. Albert's freezing skin, tingling from the cold porcelain tiles and (thankfully halted) loss of blood, was all of a sudden raked with an assault like a dragon's maw, rows of incendiary teeth masquerading as bathwater. After the hours of ritual, bloodletting and pacing and the stench of burning bodies across the street, and the hours spent kneeling, scarping his drying blood from the floor with a razor, now came the hours of waiting.

A night, perhaps, uneventful beyond what had already transpired. A morning, of coffee laced with scabs and pained expressions on the mage and his girl's youthful faces. A tea, of strained discourse and vengeful ghosts, with his grandfather.

There was no defined span of hours to count, no certainty beyond the pain in his legs and the smoke still pouring from the desiccated tenement on the other side of the road, wailing with unrepentant sirens into the night. For a while, at least, Albert would have naught to do but ruminate on what he had done. And so he sank into the bath, savoring the pain of the water on his raw skin and thanking the laws of nature that the cries of the dying lasted only a few moments.

**

* * *

-Positive Influence- **

_(the long-forgotten smell)_

"Bold move," the long-haired demon said, completely irreverent of the ashen entrails that were sliding off his naked shoulder. "_Bold_ move," he emphasized this time, the tone and his smirk perhaps indicative of introspection. The burnt flesh of the tenement-dwellers dripped out of his loose, otherwise fair hair, onto the slick tile floor of Albert's room at the inn.

Albert decided not to bother thanking the creature, choosing instead to look him up and down for the dozenth time since he'd manifested. The demon, Yuber, appeared much as he had when Albert was a child and Leon had summoned the Chaosbearer, save that the charred carnage covering his naked body was more ashen and less discernible as (erstwhile) human flesh. Albert had thought that the demon would appear less tall, but even after seventeen years of upward mobility Albert was still a good three inches shorter than the demon from his childhood. It couldn't be helped, the strategist resolved, and brushed some of the damp red hair out of his eyes. (Of all the times for the summoning to complete itself, it would have to be when Albert was just out of the baths, the scars along the backs of his legs still burning from their first exposure to lye and the strategist generally vulnerable. He inferred, though, internally, that it was probably best as a show of confidence--what better way to assure the demon that he was unafraid than to present himself unarmed and ungirt?)

Yuber scooped some of the fallen carnage from the floor and lifted it to his nose and lips, appraising them much the same way Albert was looking at him. "I'd say there were forty maggots in that nest."

"Give or take a soul," Albert agreed. "Who knows how many more their debauchery brought in?"

The demon took a casual bite out of the entrails in his hand. "And you expect to upturn that many countries in one war," he supposed with his mouth half full and the red and black flakes rimmed his sharp, brimstone-browned chin.

"No, Albert admitted and stretched his shoulders, and winced as the raw scars on his legs protested the movement. "I estimate it will take several wars."

Yuber gulped down the masticated flesh and lowered his hand, peering at the Silverberg with dark, narrow eyes. He inhaled deeply, a scent beyond rotting corpses and the dry freshness of tavern-soap. "I remember you," the demon nearly _sang_ as the smell, long-forgotten under hellfire and blood, crept up his sinuses. He looked Albert up and down, transposing the man from the child he'd last seen, and scoffed. "That's right, it's been a while in maggot-years. You've grown."

"Yes," Albert said, letting his arms grow slack at his sides, trying not to sound as defensive as he could have, at the reference to his once having been a child.

"It suits you," the demon said, over another mouthful of human flesh.

Albert smirked. "You were a positive influence," he said, and went about finding some clothes.

**

* * *

-Red-Brown-Grey- **

_(touch my scars) _

"Grandfather."

"Albert," the old man replied, not nodding, not bowing, his long red-brown-grey coat and wide red-brown-grey moustache all about him that moved. He regarded the tall youth in his doorway with a fortress' stillness, wary despite the power on his surface. He knew what this portended.

When Leon stepped aside, Albert crossed into the apartment, reaching behind himself to close the door. His face mirrored his grandfather's for inscrutability, but the rest of him was in traitorous motion; his left hand held a red-brown-grey vial, his glove pale against it as his thumb massaged the cork. And he walked with a marked stiffness, a raw and aching tread that even his impeccable posture couldn't compensate for.

The scars on Leon's palms ached under his gloves, but he did not clench his fists. "You summoned him," the old man said, believing every word.

"I have," the youth replied, still walking until he came to a wall to lean against. Leon knew this to mean that Albert did not wish to sit down, and cataloged the possible reasons why. Albert rested his back against the wall next to a family portrait--Leon, his second wife, his son (Albert's father). The painted faces said a good deal more than Albert's did.

Albert extended the hand with the vial in it toward his grandfather, delicately holding it but its stem. The vial's contents were ashen and dry, cringing against the crude interior of the glass. "You had me drink your blood seventeen years ago," he said, his voice like the pain he walked with. "I saved some of mine for you."

"Where--"

"Five leagues outside of Crystal Valley. You'll hear of the tenement fire on the street corners."

Leon scoffed. "No, whelp. Where did you draw the blood from?"

If Albert was taken aback, it showed only at the edges of his red-brown-grey lips. His smile was calm, his eyes low and narrow as he turned to face the portrait on the wall. "I will not need gloves to prevent the world from touching my scars," he said. "Few will ask, and fewer still will see them."

Leon believed he understood, and accepted the vial. "You'll never see them either," he warned, eyeing the backs of Albert's legs through his coat. "A ship cannot evaluate its own wake."

"A vessel concerned with its own wake is ignorant of the iceberg ahead," the youth retorted, glancing over his shoulder at Leon. "The scars are there. I feel them; why should I bother seeing them as well?"

"Pain forgets itself," Leon said, and uncorked the vial of dried blood.

**

* * *

-Quartet- **

_(violin music)_

He held his glass, listened to the opening cadenza, and considered his comrades.

Luc would, of course, be the First Violin. The man--hard to think of him as a man, with his childish airs and perpetually smooth face--was all flash and direction, leading them more in name and purpose than through action. Albert took in the whining of the instrument's highest string and needed no other answer; this florid line, dripping with manufactured anguish, unheeding of its support or lack there of, was as much a part of Luc as his right hand. Albert commended the violinist for producing such a detestable connection. (Was, perhaps then, the True Wind Rune Luc's substitute for the violin's bow? The instigator of nearly all his noise, but in the end, as essential to his being as the air he breathed?)

If Luc was the first, then who but Sarah would fill the role of Second Violin within their little coterie? Verily, Albert mused with a smirk, Sarah was as close to an anchor as their leader got. She mired him, dragged him forcibly out of the stormclouds of his idealism, ironically with her own. Her work was not as flashy as his but just as dependable, drawn from the same well and cut from the same cloth but not worn as prominently. They were, together, groundless, disposed to soar but unable to land.

Albert resumed actually listening to the interplay of the four strings. They muddled about in their separate registers--really, this ensemble needed instruction--the violins on top, the viola between, and the cello the only source of regularity in this amusical travesty.

The demon, then, was the Viola. Relegated to a subordinate role for lack of aspiration to anything but, gravel-textured and sour where the violins were bright. Larger and more imposing, yes, but just as easily played by the same man. It required nothing but an adjustment of a fifth, downward, to turn a violinist into a violist--the posture, the fingerings, even three of the strings are the same. And yet, few violinists would allow themselves to be--supposedly--denigrated in such a way, the short-sighted creatures.

With a renewed appreciation for the playing quartet--despite their dire need for rehearsal--Albert eyed the seated cellist. He alone seemed perturbed by the noise his fellows were producing from their instruments, or perhaps was put off at his status as their support. He had the look of a man who could actually produce music, not the simplistic bass-line of this particular quartet, meant to showcase the incompetent violins and obedient viola. Yet there he sat, the fourth of this unlikely and largely irreverent ensemble, churning out the quarter-note springboard from which the other instrumentalists leapt to their musical deaths.

He would have to tip that cellist, Albert decided, and sipped his drink.

**

* * *

-Mount- **

_(leather whip)_

There was something almost grotesque about the way Sasarai handled his horse, Albert thought. The strategist had seen all manner of riders among the solders whose paths he had crossed, from those who were ginger and reserved and beholden to the beast, to those who were tyrannical beyond human decency. He had even seen riders--elves, mostly--who were communicative and fluent to the point of apparent oneness with their mounts. And then there were those who were simply poor at riding.

The Bishop was none of these, and certainly not poor at riding. He guided the glistening white horse--Avalanche was his name, a truly magnificent creature--with the kind of passive, assumed authority and facility that Albert strove to impress upon his men. Sasarai imparted the barest twinge of pressure to the reins and the horse responded altogether too quickly. The beast was not in fear of its life, it was plain to all who had been schooled in the equestrian arts. And yet, it spirit seemed ever about to break.

The Bishop wore no spurs, but carried a taut leather whip in a sheath on his saddle. Albert had never seen him use it at this point in the campaign. Perhaps, Albert surmised, the tool was a formality, like half of the Bishop's words and gestures. He was polite without being obsequious, a paragon of genial diplomacy.

And then Sasarai had insisted on publicly punishing a troika of deserters. Without so much as a word of acknowledgment to his strategist and subordinates, Sasarai called for a full assembly, singled out the criminals, and had them first beaten, then branded, and finally bound and left to untie themselves and dress their own wounds, unarmed, in dragon-infested territory.

Albert had seen, and employed, similar methods in the past, and found them reasonably effective, though not ideal, in establishing sovereignty. He reasoned, though, that the horse Avalanche's pristine hide was so white in part due to fear, and that at least one foal had been whipped to death before his wide, mad eyes.

**

* * *

-Whetstone- **

_(go outside and shut the door)_

While it was never _impossible_ for Albert to read, there were a few sounds that made the experience less than optimal. He was easily distracted by the noise of impending combat (as well he should be); he abhorred sirens; good music played badly tended to put him out; and he had an irrational and mentally paralyzing fear of crickets, though this was known to few. The presence of any of these noises was almost certain to incite Albert to a desperation for solitude and complete silence. Those who had know Albert for long enough, or who were especially apt at discerning his weaknesses, had made certain in the past to use these noises to their advantages. And then there were those who stumbled hapless upon his faults, and only after knew too well what they had discovered.

Albert sat straight-backed against the wall of the safehouse, intent on one of the later of his ancestor Julian's journals. Yuber sat in the other corner, both blades of King Crimson across his gap-legged lap as he scraped them almost lovingly with a whetstone. The metal whimpered and screeched something _debilitating,_ a regular rhythmic glissando that shot straight up the strategist's neck and into his back teeth. He grit his teeth, slowed his breath and gave no appearance of only enduring it until the black-inked words on the vellum in front of him started to blur.

"Yuber."

"_What._"

Albert calmly turned the page. "Go outside," he said, "and shut the door."

The demon gave his blade a final scrape before obeying. He rose, and tipped his hat almost gallantly at the strategist in the far corner, smirking as brightly as the swords. The demon tossed the dull whetstone in the air and caught it with a pleasant I thud /I in his glove, and left silently.

Albert crossed his legs the other way, inched his focus out of the crickets and back into the ancient text, cursing that obstinate demon and his own weakness.

**

* * *

-Misconceive- **

_(unbearable anguish)_

"Does he...does he torture you?"

Albert declined to react, and kept his attention on the maps he was editing. "No," he answered simply, one deep note with just a hint of tremor as he closed his lips on the vowel. He reached for the salt to spill over a section of deep red ink, and found Sarah's hand blocking his from the silver shaker.

"But he is a demon," the girl prodded, in her girlish whisper of a voice that did nothing to convey the power it had. "Surely your time with him is far from pleasant."

Because it appeared to be all that would placate her, Albert looked up from the vellum-spread desk and into the young woman's calm eyes, his own expression like a plaster slave's. "You misconceive the nature of torture," he said. "To use that word attributes him actually caring about the outcome."

"But he causes you pain. He makes himself a nuisance."

"And it is still not 'torture'," Albert corrected, clasping his gloves together and explaining as he would to an underserving senior. "To torture is to exploit another's sensibilities for your own benefit. It is to use the occasionally unbearable anguish you inflict on another to attain something you actually desire enough to commit such atrocities. 'Torture' implies _will_ beyond the actual infliction of pain."

The girl removed her dainty hand from the sealant-shaker. "And Yuber lacks this?"

"Yes." Albert reached for and took the tool as if Sarah's hand had never been there. "The pain is really all he gives a thought to."

**

* * *

-Blood- **

_(a lost glove)_

He started to say, "You're getting blood all over the tent," but only got as far as "all". A bare right hand, dripping red off sharp, cruel fingernails flew up to Albert's neck and nearly broke it. He could feel the blood burning through his scarf like acid.

Albert choked on his own admonition and tried to breathe. The demon looked as if he had _been_ the battlefield, not just the last being standing on it. His hair was a tangle of chipped blades and raw entrails, caked to the thick black suit he wore, heady and rich with blood. His black hat and clothing were in tatters, pooling like windowsills in a storm with heaven only knew how many men's innards. Albert managed to glance over the demon's shoulders and saw the wake, a flagging trail of crimson fast fading to brown, and one lost black glove in the doorway.

"More," Yuber growled. "Yours."

"C-contract," Albert rasped as he felt himself being lifted off the floor by the hand at his neck.

Yuber clenched his fingers in tighter, the claws spearing through Albert's scarf. "_Damn your contract._"

"_Your_ contract," Albert corrected, as calmly as he could while being strangled. The toes of his boots scraped against the pavilion's floor as he flailed about trying to excise his knife from his pocket. "As--" he gulped in a measure of air, steeling himself for what was about to happen, "--as much yours as mine."

Albert found the knife and didn't bother fully unsheathing it, just flicked it open as much as he had to and pinched the blade, hard, between his fingertips and thumb. The blade bit through the white glove he wore and into his skin. When he felt the blood drawn, he winced, but writhed in Yuber's grip, enough to reach up and smear his blood across the demon's already stained forehead.

For barely a moment, all was still. Then the fiery letters flared out of Yuber's skin and he howled in pain, throwing the Silverberg to the floor.

Albert breathed and gathered his composure, but stared like a child at the howling monster, barely recognizable as anthropomorphic. The words burned golden across the demon's forehead, "none under a Star shall be slain" in the desperate and inelegant script that Albert had immersed himself in for years. Yuber's hair and mangled clothing, caked with carnage, flew about him in a whistling wind as he tore about the pavilion, scattering gobbets of blood wherever he turned, and his scream, a stertorous howl, stabbed through Albert's temples like a thousand poisoned darts.

**

* * *

-Chirping- **

_(control)_

The insect had infiltrated the tent on the heels of the Bishop. It had sat there, under the desk, quiet, through passive-aggressive discourse and policy and lies. It took a brief nap when Albert revised the missives, and woke out of fear when the strategist had let loose a Nasal bird to bear one of those relays to the Mage and his girl. And then the cricket had waited patiently, almost still, until Albert had snuffed out the lamps, all three of them, and lain down.

_chirp,_ the cricket said.

It took only one note, and the strategist was fully awake. He lay still on his cot, seething, teeth grit and eyes trained ceilingward.

Again, the insect pedipulated, and again, and again. He was alone, and felt alone, and pined for another of its kind that might have been lost--the cricket was a lover, a social creature, and missed the frittenancy of his compatriots He did not know the ire he incurred in the human lying there in the darkness, arms pressed into his sides so hard that his ribs suffered for it.

_chirp_, it said. _chirp. oh, where is my beloved?_

Albert began to shiver, just at his right wrist. He breathed shallowly and tried to still the shaking, but the noise had already sped up the pulse of his heart and the veins in his neck throbbed. Irrational, he told himself, vulnerable, none must know of it. Control yourself.

_chirp,_ it said. _chirp._ And again, and again, and again, begging for its mate in the language of crickets.

The tone shot straight through Albert's ears every time it sounded. _chirp,_ the shadow of a withered old man, flailing, suspended by his neck. _chirp,_ the incantation in Grandfather's voice. _chirp,_ the taste of hot blood in cold milk. Fresh, even.

He realized he'd bitten his cheek, and let it go with a start.

_chirp,_ the cricket said. _oh, where is my beloved?_

The shock at having drawn blood enabled Albert to still his shaking wrist and throw off the covers. His bare chest heaved and ankles knotted and every thin red hair on his skin stood on end. He tore toward the desk, the speed whipping his sweating bangs off his forehead, and shoved his chair aside as he fell to his knees.

_chirp,_ the cricket said, perplexed. _where's the shadow gone?_

It took two tries and both hands, but the cricket stopped asking its impertinent questions.

**

* * *

-Dramatization- **

_(monologue)_

If ever Albert was captured--as opposed to killed on sight, which seemed the more realistic option--he would have been at a loss for words. To have shown mercy would perplex and likely offend him; to be ransomed, fruitless; to be incarcerated, a truly pointless exercise, with Yuber on the prowl. When Albert was young, of course he had rehearsed his share of biting repartee with which to regale those who had outmaneuvered him, but these insults were confined to pen and ink as he evaded apprehension, one adversary at a time.

Thus, when the playwrights contrived to dramatize the Second Fire-Bringer War, and his persona was resurrected and revised from the annals of the victorious, the strategist's role was kept to orders and clipped dialogue in nearly every incarnation of the tale, and those artists who endeavored to expand his presence by way of his texts failed in all instances save one:

_"Nay, whelp. Are you now prone to such disgrace_

_To mock our vaunted creed and spite our crest?_

_The addle-pated, incredulous face_

_I see in yours provokes no small unrest._

_Yea, I am here the traitor to my lords,_

_And to their drowned and disconsolate cause,_

_But to the Star-ordained and true accords_

_I have held true to our filial laws._

_Stand you here discontent with my wrought good?_

_Is my sedition not sufficient proof_

_That our name, through fields sown thick with blood_

_Will flower tall and bounteous in truth?_

_I have done no disservice in the least_

_To those whose Stars shine fiercest on this earth_

_In handing you the reins of this grand beast_

_Just as it crosses into proven worth,_

_And mark my words, my brother so estranged_

_From that which drives my heart and moves my hand;_

_That you condemn my notions as deranged_

_Makes clear the gaps in what you understand._

_For family our causes here align;_

_The war is yours--the victory is mine."_

--Caesar, Part One. IV.iii.29-51

**

* * *

-Crumbling- **

_(4:54 pm)_

On the horizon beyond the Ceremonial Site, the sun appeared to have some difficulty setting. The Wind dragon had of course blocked it out for a good hour, around noontide, but after the Budehuc contingent had slain the formidable beast naught obstructed the sun. And now, nearing twilight, the Site was still crumbling, lowering the bar and lengthening the distance of the sun's travails and the shadows it cast as it sank beyond the plains.

Atop Hei-Tou, Albert alternated his focus between his telescope, his clock, and his incommunicative companion (for lack of a better term). Yuber had been waiting, as promised, following his 'defeat' at the hands of the mage Geddoe. The demon had busied himself until Albert's arrival by sprawling out on a warm rock and watching his skin knit itself into recuperation from his wounds. Albert left him to that, even took advantage of it, by watching the old Sindar maze crumble, miles away. Luc and Sarah were already dead, not that it mattered until someone pillaged their Runes, but around their broken bodies stones still plummeted earthward, and Albert was fascinated.

He'd never destroyed an ancient structure. He never meant to.

Returning to his clock--six minutes to seventeen--he missed the last of the stones falling where his telescope pointed. He checked again, and all was still in the new ruins of a sacred race. Albert leaned his face into the telescope's eyepiece but closed both eyes, wincing as the surrounding skin reddened under the pressure of the metal.

_The first true loss,_ he thought, as the sun finally began to set in earnest over the Grasslands.

**

* * *

-Fickle Wind- **

_(the sound of a fan)_

All the strategic accounts in the known world could not had prepared Albert for this. He had reasoned as much of the outcome as he could, taken into account nature and conditioning and extraneous factors alike. He had associated and compared prior accounts with his situation, and found remarkably little in the annals of his forebearers on the subject, but the absence spoke volumes, and Albert found himself able to formulate some clear and rather portentous hypotheses.

There was a certain inevitability to his seasickness. It ran in the Silverberg blood.

Knowing the sources of his discomfort did nothing to allay it. Try as he might he could not still the vessel's lurching, or suppress the stench of rats and oil, or tune out the fan-like constancy of the sails, flapping and creaking in the facetious, fickle wind. And no Silverberg since Elanor had considered himself a seafarer, and even _she_ had to drink herself senseless half the time in order to stabilize.

Rather than use her method, Albert kept to his cabin the first week, citing work, and doing said work when he wasn't vomiting into his chamber-pot amid Yuber's chuckling.

**

* * *

-Provocation- **

_(rusty chains)_

"If you cannot restrain your servant," the captain said, "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to book passage elsewhere."

Albert raised an elegant eyebrow and lifted his chin a touch off his deep grey scarf. "I cannot claim him as my _servant,_ he clarified, "as whatever chains that bind him to me are rusty at best."

The captain openly growled, "Fine, then. But you have to do something. He's making the crew uneasy."

"What's he done?" the strategist asked, placidly and regally uninterested.

"He's threatened to kill half of them, that's what! I'm not drawing up the anchor of my ship if that kind of headcase is on it no matter what you pay me."

Albert feigned a touch of incredulity and mused, "Now why would he be _threatening_ your crew? He usually requires at least some provocation. For instance," Albert quickly offered, halting the captain's incumbent protest with a distracting wave of his gloved hand, "he rather resents being called a 'headcase' by a mere 'maggot' as yourself."

The captain opened his mouth to object, and his face remained frozen in that fish-gaping expression when King Crimson effortlessly severed his head from his body. Spilling pints of blood onto the ship-shape deck, the captain's decapitated body sank to a subservient kneel before keeling over entirely. The head rolled gingerly against the deck's wall, beating as if in frustration.

Albert sighed. "While your timing is amusing, Yuber, was that really necessary?"

Yuber stepped onto the captain's back while crossing toward the head, the deep red wake spreading with each footstep. "Don't tell me you're concerned about your coat," the Demon said, spearing the head from the floor onto his left sword. "It's warmer where this pointless hunk of wood is going."

**

* * *

-Pirates- **

_(red, white, black)_

It took only one bout at sea for Yuber to rethink and reinvent his mortal mien. He understood that the sun grew stronger as Silverberg dragged him south, and it was not his first time slaughtering the Island-dwelling maggots, but Silverberg insisted on making a nest of that piece of driftwood, and the salt air was unpleasantly cold on Yuber's hot skin. Between the finity of the place, the fickleness of the weather, and the distinct _lack_ of things Silverberg would let him kill, Yuber was growing...irate. Of course he could go away and kill things, but finding the damn boat on the way teleporting back had the potential to make the maggots laugh and Silverberg gloat. Yuber had sliced the first bunch of maggots who had dared to laugh, but Silverberg had told him that the more crewmen he killed, the more time they'd be stuck on the ship instead of in the fray.

But the _Precipice_ had been boarded by pirates a week or so later. Yuber of course killed them all, even the ones who jumped off the floating pieces of wood and tried to escape. Yuber caught Silverberg staring and smiling as the Demon flew into the water, racing across its surface as if the waves were mere sand-dunes, steam and froth kicking up about his ankles as he ran. Blood, salt, water, red, white, black, Yuber was a blur against the debris.

The maggots on the crew stood aghast. At least they weren't about to laugh again.

With bubbling red bodies sinking in his wake, some whole, some not, some catching on the splintered planks that remained of the pirate's vessel, Yuber stalked across the water and up the _Precipice_'s hull. His swords dripped pink, then clear, seaweed mingling with the entrails that tangled about their hilts. When Albert beheld Yuber on the deck, the Demon was scowling.

"Your coat," Albert said. The garment was missing, and Yuber's white but blood-caked shirt was in tatters. He looked more the victim of the shipwreck than its cause, and not nearly as intimidating under what was visible of his hat, his half-ruined gloves, and the black pants caked like tar to his legs.

"Damn the coat," he said, steam curling from his shoulders, reeking of iron and burnt salt.

The crew parted for Yuber as he went straight to Albert's cabin, trailing blood. After a tense, clattering moment he emerged, still dripping, in one of Albert's high-necked black sweaters, pulling on white gloves, the wrists tingeing red from the grime that still clung to him. Unable to pinch a stripe of seaweed from the brim of his hat, he tossed the hat onto the deck and wrung the blood from his hair. The liquid, laced with brine, slid on the caulked floorboards, back and forth.

The demon's mismatched eyes were bright--with what, the crew was uncertain. But Albert had seen that face years ago, from a boy's view, when the demon had donned his monstrous helm at the face of Grandfather's infantry.

Albert made certain to have a few spare sweaters knit as soon as they hit port. And, of course, to arrange for a new, slightly larger and more expendable crew.

**

* * *

-Catch- **

_(a fine, unsmudged line)_

Ilana discovered the shallowness of her future husband's sleep without having slept with him--and indeed, before she had seen him three times awake. The condition was logical, upon reflection and deliberation and the sort of reading into things that teenage girls do when attractive young men appear on the scene, not at all strange to a middle-daughter of sailor-kings. In fact, to Ilana, the only novelty of this report of Lord Silverberg's sleeping uneasily lay in that everything _else_ about the mainlander was so explicitly noncombatant that such a battle-ready slumber seemed out of place.

"What else?" Ilana asked the servant who her father had assigned to Lord Silverberg's quarters. "How does he sleep? I mean..._in_ what." The girl giggled at her own lewdness, and batted her eyes behind the flowers she had gathered to arrange, spread out on the sun-drenched cloth in front of her.

"Naked as a stingray," the butler said, a smile playing at his powdered lips. "Though that might just be the heat. I don't believe the Obel weather agrees with him."

Ilana nodded--this also made sense. "So with few sheets, at least last night." The flush in her sun-browned cheeks had the same fiery sheen as her hair as she thought about the fascinating stranger. "Did you--did you see--"

"No, good heavens!" The butler laughed, waving a dismissive hand. "My, young lady, you really have set your cap after this one."

"He's a catch," the girl defended with a wily smirk.

"That he is," the butler agreed, not as approving as Ilana had hoped for.

"But what else, what else?" the girl probed, leaning eagerly over the flowers and vase.

The butler thought a moment, then slowly said, "He's...he is very pale. Paler than most mainlanders I have seen."

"Well, even now he's walking about in that heavy clothing."

"Yes, but there may be more to it than that."

Ilana's face brightened and blushed even deeper. "Ooh, this is gossip! Do tell, do tell!"

After a breath, the butler hushed his voice and leaned in closer to Ilana, nudging one of the tall, patient flowers aside. "He has strange scars," the man whispered.

"Where?" The question was barely the ghost of a sound.

"I saw...on his neck, his arms...and on the back of his legs. Like the seams in stockings, those, one fine, unsmudged line."

Ilana pursed her lips and envisioned, and winced a touch at the imagined sight. "And he knows you saw this?"

The butler straightened his posture and admitted, "Well, he awoke soon as I made a sound."

"Intriguing," the girl mused, and ducked back into the bouquet she was assembling, turning a deep-hued orchid's stem to lean against the ferns.

**

* * *

-Sword Cane- **

_(choice of weapons)_

Age imposed limits in either direction; in some cases, it was a bar to be reached, and others to be skirted. The former held true for one's style in arming oneself, Albert had found; the more juvenile the intellect, the larger and more brutal the weapon that compensated for it.

Then again, it had been a coterie of infirmed scholars that decided the pen was always mightier than the sword. Albert was a scholar himself, true, and his art of backstabbing was purely a figurative one. But he had learned--the hard way--that a Strategist is as vulnerable to an enemy blade as a kern.

It was fortunate, then, he'd grown old enough to make appropriate use of a sword-cane. Such a thing would have never served him in his twenties.

He found himself vacillating the catch on the cane's silver head, not as much in disbelief of the device's existence as ponderous of its actual worth. Such a thing was only effective until it had been used; ever after, its reputation would precede it, and he would be asked to stow it with the other crude weapons of war at every supposedly civilized gathering he meant to take it to.

Of course, if he used it properly, none would learn of it and live. At this stage he did not trust himself to use a conventional weapon 'correctly'--though the cane was a weapon for old men, and he was fast becoming one--and so it was well that he never intended to use it at all. Why bother, when he'd already killed half a billion with pen and ink?

**

* * *

-Merger- **

_(just between us for now)_

The ship, anchored at Iluya's Port of Parted Clouds, still rocked enough that the tea service rattled. The spoon shifted around the sugar-bowl's rim, batting gently into his comrade in the spice-dish. Under the table, the cabin's floors creaked slickly as the _Precipice_ swayed, and the guest in this cabin tapped the heel of his traveling-boot against the leg of his chair.

"Thank you," Lucian said, hands clasped tightly around his teacup and eyes demurely closed. "For meeting me on such short notice," the young man clarified.

Albert set down the spoon he'd used to stir honey into his own tea and raised his cup. "On the eve of your departure, how could I refuse?" he asked, though he did not expect an answer. His son, now twenty-two and having let his hair out of its ponytail, was a man of unresolved questions.

Lucian nodded and sipped his tea--thick with cream--his shoulders tense with unease on his father's ship. The _Precipice_ was not a homely vessel in the least, with a small and quiet crew thanks to the Kamandohl wheels that propelled it. It was built for sharp, stable turns and swift errands between the larger ships in whatever fleet Albert had consigned himself to, for the occasional Rune-cannon distraction, and for the few people who could tolerate Yuber for an extended period of time. It was _not_ built for entertaining, not even for matters of state, and this cabin, though not as austere as the rest of the ship (boasting only a bed, a desk, a table for two and a glass-plated bookcase), was hardly as sumptuous as its owner's wealth warranted.

"So," Albert said," you are going home."

"I am going to Gregminster, and then north," Lucian said, trying not to sound as if he was correcting his father but unwilling to let stand the idea that 'home' was in that general direction. "I believe the house you grew up in still stands."

"It does." Leon had left Altestein to Caesar, but Caesar's deportation proved convenient for Lucian to inherit the manor. Albert set down his tea and let it further steep, rippling on the swaying table. "To whom have you yielded the company?"

"To none. I will continue to manage it."

"From Altestein?" Albert asked, with a musical incredulity. "Your couriers must be well-paid."

"I am optimistic about my merger with the Bastion clan," Lucian replied, unable to help a smirk over the rim of his teacup, "but that is just between us, for now."

"Well done," Albert said plainly, and lifted his tea with a delicate wave that might have been intended for a toast. "Is Shu still breathing, then?"

"I should hope so. My deal depends on it." Lucian watched his father sip the tea for a moment, but turned away to glance at the vehemently glaring sun, whitening the cabin's thick window. He wondered if his father had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of driving people to doubt their own capabilities. "He trusts our name," Lucian finished, still ill-at-ease.

Albert savored his tea for a spell before inquiring as to why his son was _really_ here.

Lucian realized that he'd not set his cup down since picking it up at the first, and that the china had lost its warmth. "Before I go," he began, as he'd rehearsed, "I feel there is something I ought know."

"Do go on," Albert prompted when Lucian forgot to.

After a long raw of the tea--warmer than is container--Lucian posed his actual concern through an itching throat. "Your servant, Yuber."

"What of him."

"...He has not aged a day since I was a child," Lucian whispered, quickly, dreading the response. Perhaps his fears were grounds only for further mockery in his father's eyes. He looked up--though he was unsure of when he'd lost track of his conversant's face--and found one of the strangest sights he could have ever hoped to see.

His father's face... It was not the resolute, nearly peaceful happiness Lucian had once or twice seen in his extreme youth, when his parents sat together. Nor was it the false sort of smile Lucian had imagined in nightmare. Perhaps it was not a smile at all. But Albert's face, as Lucian saw it then, held a _relieved_ stability, a brief fluttering of the eyelids that reminded Lucian of tasting red wine for the first time and finding it agreeable.

"Nor since _I_ was a child," Albert said, as the expression retreated into his perpetual mask of high cheekbones and competence. He slid back his chair and rose from the tea-table, walking smoothly past Lucian across the floor with reverence to the ship's motion, until he came to the tall shelf of resplendent books, lovingly encased in metal and glass against the cabin's wall. He slid a pane aside just enough to draw out a venerable, leatherbound book, thin and about the color of the index finger of Albert's immaculate white glove.

He extended the book to Lucian, and the cover bore the family's one-eyed crest in crystalline silver, flaring blindingly into Lucian's eyes as the young man turned away. "But that," Albert said, "Is just between us, for now." The faint twinges of a smirk crept out to rest on his slowly wrinkling lips.

**

* * *

-Taxidermy- **

_(an old rug, rolled up and tied)_

The boar had gone down fighting, his master of the hunt had said. It showed. The corpse's eyes were wild and its gums frayed, cleft only where the lucky crossbow bolt had flown past its wind-whipped lips on the way to its throat. The boar's tusks, long as Lucian's forearms and easily as broad at the nape, were streaked with grass and earth and blood, weeks since the pig's last trip to the creek. He was a beautiful, if ordinary, creature, and Lucian meant to preserve as much of that as tools and time would warrant.

"Master Silverberg?"

Lucian, still intent on getting the wild boar's maw to remain in its menacing sneer, barely heard the servant. The beast's hide, thick with pomade and reeking of boiled jellyfish, was obstinate and tough under his gloves, and the heavy needle seemed to have gone blunt.

"Master Silverberg?" the servant inquired again.

If he could just slide the jawbone over one more nail's width--

"Milord?"

"What?" the young lord paused with the cadaver's left tusk in one hand and the flickering needle in his other.

The servant in the doorway was one of three, and the smallest. The two larger men behind him, barely visible from Lucian's workroom, held between them an old rug, rolled up and tied. A faint haze of silvery red hair was visible in the cylinder's cavern. "We got her," the unencumbered servant said. "It took work--that's one bastard of a prison--but we got her."

"You will be paid," Lucian said, setting down his needle and propping the boar's tusk atop a nearby wooden vice.

The small servant--a wiry, middle-yeared man with the air of a small-time crook--tossed his head at the lackeys and stepped aside for them, and the hulking men laid the rolled carpet down on one of Lucian's worktables. "You don't plan on--" he started, with a wary but twinkling eye at the bound corpse.

"Certainly not," Lucian snapped, stepping between the couriers with enough force to drive them to back away. "I've never preserved a human, you think I'd dare start with my own mother?"

"Heh," the servant scoffed, glancing around the workroom at the frozen, impassioned shells of his master's taxidermy. The room still spooked him in ways he didn't understand, and his master's 'trademark' of greying the monsters' eyes to match the family crest was hardly calming to the servant's heartburn.

The servant tried to ignore the dozens of solemn grey eyes in the faces of the dead beasts, and turned back to his master, whose hands were hovering uncertainly over the rotting rug. The young lord's wine-colored curls hung over his eyes and cheeks, with a deep sheen in the workroom's bright light. "Should I notify your father?" the servant asked.

"No," Lucian said quickly, spitting out the tears that had already congregated at the corners of his lips. "He probably knows. After all, it's his fault she's dead."

**

* * *

-Match- **

_(monk)_

Playing Ritapon with Sasarai was not unlike acupuncture. To a man like Albert--perpetually unable to relax, with muscles atrophied into mealy tautness, shoulders that might as well be cangued, and a back that had almost forgotten how to bend--it was a recalcitrant pain that could only justify itself by its benefits and his willingness to wait for them. The Bishop--Archbishop, recently--was a flighty player, arbitrary in an almost psychologically sound sense. Albert tended to win, but Sasarai tended to walk away from the table happier, which suited them both fine.

"Pon," the Archbishop declared, sliding over two of his tiles with his half-dead, gloved hand, and reaching with his good hand for the corresponding piece that had found itself in the presentation pile. Albert's tile set was antique, each face bearing stylized portraits of the Obel Royal Family, pale-haired and ruddy-cheeked against the solid backgrounds. It had belonged to his wife, decades ago, who had taught him how to play when they had been young. The troika of tiles that Sasarai now turned over was the last three En Kuldes kings, Lino, Lazlo, and Lano.

With a casual smile, Sasarai then picked up a Fire tile from his hand and flourished it gingerly in the air. His youthful eyes closed into crows-footed smiles as he set the tile on top of one of Albert's, nudging the face-down piece into the discard pile. Of course, Sasarai had just destroyed the tile that would allow him to win this round at all, but what the Archbishop did not know could not erase his smile.

Albert nodded, and reached for the draw table, plucking two tiles off the top. With a practiced sleight, he turned them around between his fingers. One matched his row of red-backgrounded En Llordrian kings, the other an Earth Rune, to match his unused Wind and Water tiles. Without a word, he slid those tiles into their slots and turned the rows over. The tiles clicked like a secret code.

"Well then," Sasarai laughed. "Were I a lesser man, I'd soon be broke."

"What are you paying me to distract you from, your Holiness?" Albert asked, ignoring the jealous creaking in his aging wrists as he smoothed the tiles with his gloves.

Sasarai drew, and shrugged his boyish shoulders. "I feel old," he said.

For perhaps the fiftieth time since this alliance had resurfaced, Albert fought back the urge to throw it all away. He could tell Yuber to go right ahead, take True Earth down, torture Orosi and burn down the entire fleet. Or he could simply shove his sword-cane down the Archbishop's throat so that he never smiled his child's smile again.

With a pout, Sasarai flipped over a tile and discarded it. "Ron," Albert said, and took it.

**

* * *

-The Strength of Dead Men- **

_(destiny)_

"Please..." the prisoner wheezed. "Please, give me the answer..."

Albert had been just about to leave the brig. He was _through_ with this, fed up with having to restrain Yuber, and displeased with how the battle had gone. Albert's forces had beaten back the Coalition's fleet and captured (barely) Schvarzeleber's third, but the wind had been in the adversaries' favor and borne reinforcements from Goya--and with them the bearer of the Dragon Rune. Albert cursed the Dragon Knights for their resilience and their commander for his altruism, and the prisoner for his necessity.

"Clarify," Albert demanded, stilling his cane and gesturing for the black-masked interrogator to wait, but not looking back at the prisoner.

"Is fate..." The wheedling in the prisoner's voice said everything about his countenance that needed to be said. The fallen Dragon Knight was not broken, and would not be broken--his clothing was tattered with salt and wind but he still spoke like a leader of men. But the Knight knew that his world had just ended with the death of his Dragon, and all for which he had been groomed was drowned.

"Is fate _what?_" Albert intoned, rescinding the prisoner's right to speak. "Unchangeable?" He glared into the blur outside his monocle rather than turn back toward the brig. "Do desist with citing the works of your betters. The more you attempt to alleviate your pain with the strength of dead men, the more we'll have to administer to breach it."

That angered the prisoner enough to drive him to spit through the bars. "I'll never run out of heroes," he growled.

"Nor I of the desire to unmake them," Albert said, and gave the interrogator the signal to begin. He left the brig behind, and did not hear restrained screaming until he was at the end of the hallway.

**

* * *

-Wanted- **

_(immortal)_

I smile.

I know he poisoned these blades.

He is incredulous. He is angry. He is surprised. He slits my throat. He sees I have taught him. He knows I have taught him. I have taught him. I have let my mark on a demon. I have seen through his ploy. I have won. I have offended him. He tries to undo what he has done. I knew his mouth would be like fire. I think my spine will snap. I am not alone. My senses have not abandoned me. My senses have not failed me. Poison.

There had been a blade before his tongue. I burn. I hurt. I feel. I have lost my shields. I am losing my words. I am pale, dry, old. The blood has ceased to flow. My cheek burns as it rots, green, ugly. I think he wanted me to join him.

A hundred and thirteen years.

I laugh for hours before I die.

_

* * *

When I alone maintain the cords that bind me, _

_When I determine all that lies before,_

_When all that gives me pleasure is behind me_

_From life I will not ask a moment more._

* * *


End file.
